The Saquon Barkley Origin Story: Defining Moments Through the Eyes of his Coaches, NFL Scouts
Saquon Barkley has always made the impossible look routine
This week, in particular, is a week of firsts for the star running back on the brink of football immortality.
In his first season in a Philadelphia Eagles uniform, and focal point of the offense, Barkley is an MVP finalist for the first time in his career.
And, after rushing for 2,005 yards during the regular season, Barkley is preparing for his first NFC Championship Game appearance, one victory shy of playing in his first Super Bowl.
While each time the ball is in Barkley’s hands offers the chance for something momentarily spectacular, at times never before seen— such as his reverse hurdle of a Jacksonville Jaguars defender where he stuck the landing and spun forward to extend the play two more yards, there also had to be that first moment—that moment the light went off signaling Barkley had generationally rare traits to eventually develop into one of the greatest players ever to play the position.
“You could tell when he was a freshman at Penn State,” a veteran AFC Scout tells me, of Barkley. “We were watching someone else, and he just jumped off the screen.
“It was like watching Adrian Peterson when he was a freshman at Oklahoma. Those guys are easy to pick out.”
By now, you’ve long been aware that the Giants, somewhat tragically for all involved, selected Barkley No. 2 overall in the 2018 NFL Draft despite not having the roster in place to ever truly maximize his traits, rendering him a displaced superstar for a franchise and a market where his skills more than justified his draft slotting. And being mired as a misfit existing in a place that was set up for failure, he ultimately was never able to help lift the franchise to prominence.
You’re also, I’m sure, acutely familiar with the renaissance at the position that he’s become the face of in 2024 as his success in Philadelphia, Josh Jacobs’ as a driving force for the Green Bay Packers, and the emergence of fellow former first-round pick Jahmyr Gibbs with the Detroit Lions having had a transformational impact on how the running back position is viewed, utilized, and valued, especially for contending teams.
However, what you may not have heard, and what I sought to find out this week, was what was that first moment for the executives, evaluators, and coaches, who have shaped Saquon Barkley’s football career when they realized that he is truly special?
Now 1,546 NFL carries, 7,216 yards, and 62 total touchdowns later, that AFC scout’s intuition rings true.
But, what was the play that made him stand out as a man amongst Lehigh Valley boys on the field at Whitehall Coplay? When was the moment Penn State realized it had a program launching culture-driver of a mismatch creator on its hands? What sparked the Giants to willingly eschew positional value to make sure Barkley becomes the face of the franchise and the centerpiece of a rebuild? How were the Eagles so sure Barkley could be the missing piece?
I spoke to the instrumental decision-makers at each step of Barkley’s football journey to find out.
The Birth of a Star: Saquon Barkley's High School Heroics at Whitehall-Coplay
Brian Gilbert had no idea he had a potential future NFL MVP on his hands.
How could the former Whitehall head coach have seen this coming when Barkley first took the field for the Zephyrs’ JV team?
“Saquon’s story is really a story of growth,” Gilbert told me by phone this week. “From ninth grade, through 12th grade, through every season at Penn State, and then throughout his career in the pros, he’s better this year than last year, and he’ll be better next year than he was this year. It’s just a product of how he’s wired.
“It’s about how his mind works, as far as his work ethic. Whatever he achieves this year, I guarantee someone will talk to him and he’ll already be setting a new goal for himself.”
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Perhaps, even Barkley might already be thinking about how to set out to break Eric Dickerson’s single-season rushing record in 17 games to take any debate over playing for the chance to surpass it in the season finale off the table.
But, from being humbled and excited about an offer from Kutztown University early in his high school career to soon after committing early to Rutgers before ultimately choosing to stay home and play for head coach James Franklin and his staff at Penn State, Barkley consistently improved as his high school career progressed.
But, even though Gilbert doesn’t possess the ability to see the future, there was one play that left him and the coaching staff gobsmacked by what their feature back is capable of.
Barkley had to bide his time behind one of his best friends on the team, fellow running back James Wah.
As a junior, Wah averaged 7.43 yards per carry and scored three touchdowns. Then, Wah suffered an ankle injury early in a Whitehall playoff game against Del Val.
That’s when Barkley announced his presence to the football universe.
“We put Saquon in the game,” Gilbert recalls. “And I go ‘Okay, let’s let the young guy get a hit first, and let’s just run iso.’ So, we ran iso right up the middle, thinking we’d let him get hit.
“We ran iso, and he took it 70 yards for a touchdown. So, we all looked at each other thinking we should’ve been playing the kid a little bit sooner, but that was the moment where we were like ‘holy crap, did he just do that?’ He just exploded out of a canon, in a district playoff game, and took it to the house on his first carry.
“For a lot of us on the Whitehall coaching staff, that was kind of our moment when we knew he was going to be really special.”
Unfortunately for Whitehall, their season ended that night in a playoff loss.
But, as he emerged from the Friday night lights across the Lehigh Valley, Barkley's meteoric rise continued at Penn State, where his legend only grew.
Penn State: Saquon Barkley’s Barkley’s Iconic Moments Roaring Through Happy Valley
After turning heads on high school football fields roughly 170 miles east, Barkley took his talents to Happy Valley, where he became more than just a playmaker—he became a culture driver and program-altering force for Penn State football.
Multiple members of the Nittany Lions coaching staff, who were in Happy Valley during Barkley’s career, point to a moment not in a game, but rather during the heat of summer practices as their Barkley moment:
In what is essentially a modified Oklahoma Drill, back in 2016 when Barkley was a true sophomore, he flashed superhuman agility, explosiveness, and escapability in Penn State’s “Lion’s Den” drill, leaving defenders in his wake on his way to a touchdown.
“You saw a little bit of why he was special and different every single day in, in every single thing that he does,” former Penn State offensive coordinator and current University of Akron head coach Joe Moorehead told me during a recent phone call. “From the way he attacks strength and conditioning workouts, his attention to detail in meetings, his leadership, and obviously when you get out on the practice field, he would do something, and you kind of look to your left, look to your right and ask anyone who would listen ‘did that just happen?’”
Barkley’s insane athleticism was on display throughout his collegiate career, whether it was an opening salvo on a 69-yard touchdown in a 2017 win over Michigan, or a dazzling dash through the heart of the USC defense in the Rose Bowl, or countless plays in between, it’s little wonder that his draft stock seemed to soar whenever the ball was in his hands.
“You can pick any play from the two years I was there in 2016 and 2017,” Moorhead says. “But that 2017 game in Iowa most accurately encapsulates a guy just taking over a game.”
That night in Iowa City, Barkley ran roughshod over the Hawkeyes for 211 yards and a touchdown while adding 12 catches for 94 yards in a thrilling last-second 21-19 Nittany Lions comeback win.
“I don’t know that there was one play that illustrates his it factor,” Moorhead says. “Because there were so many of them, but if there were one game, it would be that night in Iowa.”
Across three seasons at Penn State, Barkley took home Big Ten Offensive Player of The Year honors twice and was named a consensus First-Team All-American in 2017.
Rushing for 3,843 yards and 43 touchdowns, while averaging 5.7 yards per carry and catching 102 passes for 1,195 yards and eight touchdowns during his collegiate career, it’s little wonder, then, that the Giants took one look at Barkley and realized they had to have him at the top of the draft.
New York Giants: When the Giants Knew Saquon Was Special
The tale of Barkley’s career in New York would be befitting of a Broadway tragedy.
In an effort to continue building around Eli Manning and prolific wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr., general manager Dave Gettleman and the Giants chose Barkley—unquestionably a game-altering talent, over the likes of quarterbacks Josh Allen and Sam Darnold, defensive ends Bradley Chubb, cornerback Denzel Ward, and stalwart offensive guard Quenton Nelson.
And, while Barkley averaged 868 rushing yards and nearly six touchdowns per season, it wasn’t just that injuries ravaged his time in the Garden State (a torn ACL two weeks into the 2020 season, multiple high ankle sprains, among other ailments), the Giants were simply never able to build out an offensive line capable of maximizing his impact nor a roster capable of competing where he could make the kind of difference his traits suggest he’s capable of.
However, to those who coached and played with Barkley, his potential and his talent, were obvious all along.
“As an evaluator, you ask yourself who does this player remind me of,” a longtime Giants front office official tells me, on the condition of anonymity to speak freely about a player now on another team. “I watched Saquon’s last two seasons at Penn State, and every snap of every game, it was his body of work, his desire to be great, his mental makeup that convinced us he had what it would take to be great.
“I can’t remember one single play that convinced us, but it’s about the evaluation of a player’s full body of work that should bring an evaluator to those conclusions.”
The Giants’ faith was immediately rewarded when he burst onto the scene when he took home NFL Offensive Rookie of The Year honors after rushing for 1,307 yards and 11 touchdowns in 2018.
However, during his time in New York, Barkley helped power the Giants to just one playoff berth and a victory over the Minnesota Vikings in the 2023 NFC Wild Card round.
But, following what seemed to be contentious negotiations between Barkley and Giants general manager Joe Schoen, the star running back became a free agent for the first time and landed in the ideal situation to both cement his legacy and chase the Lombardi Trophy.
Philadelphia Eagles: The Missing Piece to a Legacy-Defining Puzzle
For Barkley, Philadelphia offered not just a new team, but a second chance to realize his full potential in a system built for him to thrive.
So much of Barkley’s success this season is a culmination and mirror image of the moments that have shaped him as a player from his first carries in the Lehigh Valley, through his dominant collegiate career, and his flashes of greatness since stepping onto an NFL field for the first time.
“The cool thing for me as I watch it is,” Moorhead says. “A lot of the concepts that we were running [with Saquon at Penn State] in 2016 and 2017, are the things that Nick Sirianni and Kellen Moore are utilizing now to get him out in space and create one-on-one opportunities for him.
“Aside from what he’s doing personally, and what the Eagles are doing as a team, I’m like ‘alright, this staff really knows how to utilize his skill-set.”
Barkley now, unlike his time in New York, is playing for a coaching staff that understands how to maximize his impact as a player and is allowing him to elevate a roster that was already a ready-made Super Bowl contender before he put pen to paper on a three-year deal worth $37.5 million in free agency.
In an era where running backs have never been valued less, Eagles general manager Howie Roseman looked at the opportunity to add Barkley behind the game’s premier offensive line, alongside mobile quarterback Jalen Hurts, as a centerpiece of an offense that already included playmakers A.J. Brown, DeVonta Smith, and Dallas Goedert as the kind of bold move that turns a playoff contender into a Super Bowl favorite.
“It’s hard to find difference-making players and people, and it’s hard to find them for a cost,” Roseman said, during an appearance on SiriusXM’s Mad Dog Sports Radio shortly after the Eagles signed Barkley. “Those guys, they go for a lot of money, and we felt like there was an opportunity to get one of those guys in Saquon and bring him to the team. There’s risk in every decision you make, but we don’t think there’s any risk on the talent.
“We don’t think there’s any risk on the person. And we also feel like maybe — not that it wasn’t anywhere else — but we have a good situation here with us in Philly to kind of maximize him. I don’t think there’s anyone when he came out of the draft that didn’t think he wasn’t a Hall of Fame-caliber talent and person. He’s still young, and we’re really excited to have him.”
Roseman’s big swing underscores what makes him and the Eagles one of the few general managers and front offices across the NFL capable of building sustained success, and his particular bet on Barkley has paid immediate dividends.
Whether it be rattling off a 78-yard dash through the snow to put the Eagles’ playoff victory over the Los Angeles Rams on ice, or the big run to salt away a win over the Baltimore Ravens this season, Barkley has proven instrumental in Philadelphia’s run towards a second Super Bowl appearance in three seasons.
Despite falling 100 yards shy of breaking Dickerson’s rushing record, Barkley shattered the Eagles’ single-season rushing mark, previously held by LeSean McCoy’s 1,607-yard 2013 campaign this season.
However, as impressive as individual records might be, Barkley and Philadelphia have sights set on far loftier goals; holding the Lombardi aloft in New Orleans next month.
From his first high school playoff run to his first NFC Championship appearance, Saquon Barkley's journey has been defined by turning potential into dominance. Now, with the Eagles one victory away from the Super Bowl, the brightest moment of his career could be just ahead, perhaps as an echo of his football past.
“That run that he had back then,” Gilbert says. “When I see him break the four long runs he had in both games against the Rams [this season], where he breaks out of the pack, that’s what that was back in his sophomore year of high school.
“He never looked back after that.”
